Lecture 7

5th - conformity
Joan Ferrante
Sociology: a global perspective
Chapter 7
● mass surveillance - Watching or otherwise monitoring the movements, activities,
conversations, and associations of targeted populations with the purposes of preventing
people from engaging in what is defined as wrongdoing, catching those engaged in acts
of “wrongdoing,” protecting the public from “wrongdoers,” and rewarding and penalizing
those who engage or fail to engage in specific actions (for example, good driving).
● deviance - Any behavior or physical appearance that is socially challenged or condemned
because it departs from the norms and expectations of a group.
● conformity - Behavior and appearances that follow and maintain the standards of a group;
also the acceptance of the cultural goals and the pursuit of those goals through means
defined as legitimate.
● social control - Methods used to teach, persuade, or force a group’s members, and even
nonmembers, to comply with and not deviate from its norms and expectations.
● folkways - Norms that apply to the mundane aspects or details of daily life.
● mores - Norms that people define as essential to the well-being of their group. Violation
of mores can result in severe forms of punishment.
● disciplinary society - A social arrangement that normalizes surveillance, making it
expected and routine.
● Functionalist perspective. Émile Durkheim (1901) argued that although definitions of
what constitutes deviance vary by place, it is present in all societies. He defined deviance
as acts that offend col-lective norms and expectations. Durkheim believed that what
 makes an act or appearance deviant is not so much its character or consequences, but that
a group has defined it as dangerous or threatening to its well-being.
● Labeling theorists maintain that an act is deviant when people notice it and then take
action to label it as a violation and apply sanctions.

●
● conformists - People who have not violated the rules of a group and are treated
accordingly.
● pure deviants - People who have broken the rules of a group and are caught, punished,
and labeled as outsiders.
● secret deviants - People who have broken the rules of a group but whose violation goes
unnoticed or, if it is noticed, prompts those who notice to look the other way rather than
reporting the violation.
● falsely accused - People who have not broken the rules of a group but are treated as if
they have.
● Sociologist Kai Erikson (1966) maintained that people are most likely to be falsely
accused of a crime when the well-being of a country or a group is threatened.
● witch hunt - A campaign to identify, investigate, and correct behavior that has been
defined as undermining a group or country. Usually this behavior is not the real cause of
a problem but is used to distract people’s attention from the real cause or to make the
problem seem manageable.
● primary deviants - Those people whose rule breaking is viewed as understandable,
incidental, or insignificant in light of some socially approved status they hold.
● secondary deviants - Those whose rule breaking is treated as something so significant
that it cannot be overlooked or explained away.
● master status of deviant - An identification that proves to be more important than most
other statuses that person holds, such that he or she is identified first and foremost as a
deviant.
● The person who, with inner conviction, loathes stealing, kill-ing, and assault may find
himself performing these acts with relative ease when commanded by authority. Behavior
that is unthinkable in an individual who is acting on his own may be executed without
hesitation when carried out under orders.
● constructionist approach - A sociological approach that focuses on the way specific
groups, activities, conditions, or artifacts become defined as problems.
● claims makers - People who articulate and promote claims and who tend to gain in some
way if the targeted audience accepts their claims as true.
● claims-making activities - Actions taken to draw attention to a claim, such as “demanding
services, filling out forms, lodging complaints, filing lawsuits, calling press conferences,
writing letters of protest, passing resolutions, publishing exposés, placing ads in
newspapers, . . . setting up picket lines or boycotts”.
● Structural strain theory holds that deviance is a response to an imbalance between
culturally valued goals and the socially acceptable ways for achieving those goals.
● structural strain - Any situation in which (1) the valued goals of a society have unclear
limits, (2) people are unsure whether the legitimate means will allow them to achieve the
goals, and (3) legitimate opportunities for reaching the goals remain closed to a
significant portion of the population.
●
● innovation - The acceptance of cultural goals but the rejection of the legitimate means to
achieve them.
● ritualism - The rejection of cultural goals but a rigid adherence to the legitimate means of
achieving them.
● retreatism - The rejection of both culturally valued goals and the means of achieving
them.
● rebellion - The full or partial rejection of both the goals and the means of attaining them
and the introduction of a new set of goals and means.
● Criminal behavior is learned; thus, criminals constitute a special type of conformist in
that they conform to the norms of the group with which they associate.
● illegitimate opportunity structures - Social settings and arrangements that offer people the
opportunity to commit particular types of crime.
● white-collar crimes - Crimes committed by those with high status and respectable
positions as they carry out the duties and responsibilities of their occupation.
 ●
● corporate crimes - Crimes committed by a corporation through the way that it does
business as it competes with other companies for market share and profits.

On Being Sane in Insane Places